Greetings from Lancaster NH, where I have wifi internet access but no cellphone signal. PorcFest is great fun so far – it’s like Woodstock for rational people. Seeing lots of old friends. Beautiful countryside also; nice to be in this neck of the woods again. There’s a C4SS/ALL table where the literature looks vaguely familiar. I’ve given a couple of talks already and have more coming up.
Free Talk Live, a Keene-based libertarian radio show, is broadcasting from PorcFest all week. They interviewed me last night; you can listen here. My bit starts around 23:24.
Go to this satellite image and zoom in on London’s Russell Square to see something a bit scary. I certainly don’t recall seeing anything coming in quite that low when I was staying in that neighbourhood. (I’d be less surprised if it were San Diego.)
Addendum:
I just thought of a possible explanation. It has to do with the way perspective works in photographs taken at great distances. But I don’t know enough about the subject to know whether it applies in this case.
a) The second season of Steven Moffat’s Sherlock has begun filming, and the titles of the new episodes have now been announced. The titles arguably count as spoilers for anyone familiar with the source material, so click at your own risk.
b) I’ve had a love-hate relationship with this song since my childhood. The music is haunting; the lyrics are imbecilic:
If you don’t remember that song from The Wizard of Oz, it’s because during the 60s and 70s Disney produced several additional Oz records; the three I had as a kid (perhaps the only three made?) were based on L. Frank Baum’s The Scarecrow of Oz and The Tin Woodman of Oz, and Ruth Plumly Thompson’s The Cowardly Lion of Oz. (One of the accompanying storybooks, I forget which, seized my youthful imagination by featuring a smoking hot Ozma who bore no resemblance to the one in the books.) [12/4/13 addendum: I misremembered; it was Polychrome, not Ozma, who was thus pulchritudinously portrayed, in the Tin Woodman storybook.] In addition to the songs from the Wizard of Oz movie, the record pictured in the video contains some, though not all, of the songs from these additional records.
c) I’ve blogged previously about Moon Europa, an intriguing indy science fiction film I first saw previewed at Asheville’s Revoluticon back in 2006. The site and trailers I previously linked to are gone now (and inaccessible even by Wayback, thanks to Killer Robots). According to IMDB, the film was released in 2009. But elsewhere I read that what came out in 2009 was a shorter version, now called Solatrium, and the makers are still hoping to “expand the story into a feature-length film, Moon Europa.”
The old trailers are frustratingly gone, but two new trailers, one labeled Solatrium and the other Moon Europa (though they are evidently the same movie), are available:
